Welcome to the Get Fit Guys, quick and dirty tips to slim down and shape up.

My name is Ben Greenfield. I'm the Get Fit Guy. And in today's episode, I'm going to give you my top three active recovery workouts.

Now, the day after I completed the recent Spartan Agoji, which is a brutal

48-hour event in frigid temperatures at 40 degrees below zero, and you can learn more about that

over at Ben-Greenfield Fitness.com slash A-G-O-G-E. That's A-G-O-G-E. I posted on my Twitter account that I was looking for a gym.

And one reply that I got back was, don't you take any days off? Well, my reply was active recovery

rules. So what was my active recovery after that brutal 48-hour event? Well, before my flight

home, I hit the Equinox gym in Boston for a mix of yoga in the sauna, some hypoxic breath hold

underwater swimming, foam rolling, mobility bandwork, aerobics, and some lightweight training. And in this episode,

you'll learn why I decided to do that rather than simply take the day off to watch Game

of Thrones on the couch. And I'm going to give you my top three active recovery workouts.

So let's start here, why you'd want to do active recovery? Well, the concept is actually pretty simple.

In a nutshell, rather than letting inflammation, swelling, and muscle damage sit there after you've done a hard workout or race, you instead move the muscles, massage the muscles, and even introduce more blood flow into specific areas of damaged tissue so you heal faster and so that you're better

able to bounce back more quickly. Active recovery also helps move your immune system's lymph fluid

to move around your body so that you're less likely to get sick after a tough workout or event.

So what are my top three active recovery workouts? Well, number one is foam rolling.

They had this study. They published in medicine and science and sports and exercise. It investigated

whether foam rolling could reduce soreness and boost recovery. And they looked at the impact

of foam rolling on soreness following a squat workout. In this study, they split 20 men into two

groups, and both groups did a fatiguing squat protocol with 10 sets of 10 squats at 60% of their

1-REP max. After the initial bout of squats, both groups were evaluated for their soreness level,

quadriceps and hamstring range of motion, performance

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